Apocalypse films
have riddled our cinemas in the last decade, but in a surprising turn of events
some of the most successful of this summer have been comedies. This is the End was as Hollywood as
possible, while the somewhat similarly titled The World’s End is the final film in the extremely popular British
films directed by Edgar Wright. The
World’s End is the final film in the Cornetto Trilogy (also known as the
‘Blood and Ice Cream’ Trilogy), which began with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.

Keeping true to
the themes of male friendship paired with a melancholy about youth lost, The
World’s End is a fitting end to the trilogy. Simon Pegg serves as our narrator,
and the film’s most volatile and unpredictable character, Gary King. Struggling
to adjust to the idea of being an adult as he reaches middle-age, King
convinces his former cohorts of youth (Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan
and Paddy Considine) for a return visit down memory lane. They attempt a pub
crawl 20 years after they failed it the first time, and somehow become
entangled in a robotic overtaking of sorts.

Grabbers makes a perfect viewing
companion to Edgar Wright’s The World’s
End, as both provide a plot that allows its characters to get increasingly
drunk as a means of survival from an otherworldly attack. In The World’s End it is done through robots
and a body snatcher narrative, whereas Grabbers
utilizes the creature feature storyline, with intoxication being the one
available means of defense. Horror and comedy are balanced with the use of
inebriation, adding more absurdity to a purposefully campy film.

The film takes
place on a small fishing village on an island off the coast of Ireland, where
police officer Ciaran O’Shea (Richard Coyle) is able to drink himself into a
stupor while carrying out his menial tasks within the community. The arrival of
a straight-laced officer named Lisa Nolan (Ruth Bradley) only highlights the
state in which O’Shea has let himself go. When a mysteriously unidentifiable
squid-like creature is discovered in a lobster trap, it is all the reason
O’Shea needs to stop drinking. Ironically, it also requires that everyone else
starts drinking, for their own safety.

Dealin’ with Idiots works as a film
because of how much of the material was obviously taken from personal
experience. Some people are so strange in their behavior and attitudes that
meeting them leaves any sane person in disbelief. This film is filled with
characters inspire by these real-life lunatics we all encounter on a daily
basis, like it or not.

Jeff Garlin
directs this highly improvised comedy about the dysfunctional personality types
infecting a children’s little league team. Hilariously enough, the children are
hardly more than props in the film’s storyline. This is much more about the
over-enthusiastic adults living vicariously through their child’s success on
the baseball field. Nearly everyone takes the game far too seriously,
counterbalanced by the laid-back comedian protagonist played by Garlin himself.

I hated this
movie. I hated it so much that I repeatedly stopped watching it out of anger at
the filmmaker for assuming such a low-level of stupidity from the audience that
nearly every sequence is flawed from every possible aspect considered. The
basic plot is asinine and unoriginal, the dialogue is atrociously bad, the
characters are poorly developed with no continuity to their behavior and
actions, and the way every single scene is framed, shot and edited made me want
to take the disc out of my player and eat it just so that I would be able to
vomit this piece of shit out in a toilet where it belongs. Because it is worth
saying one more time; I hated this movie.

The plot hardly
seems worth describing, because all logic is thrown out the window in order to
make events occur within each scene and in the grander scheme of the narrative.
There is hardly a believable moment in the entire film, from the manner with
which characters are killed to the absolute lack of police work done by detectives
investigating them. This film makes Wild
Things look like a masterpiece. Compared to this film, Throw Mama From the Train was a brilliant adaptation of the Strangers on a Train narrative. Even
worse is the film’s attempt to cash in on lesbian fantasies, while making
villains out of the film’s homosexuals and heroes out of the heterosexuals.
Director Jamie Babbit made a humorous profound statement with But I’m Cheerleader, but destroys all of
that work with the impressively tactless screenplay by Mark Distefano and
Guinevere Turner.

When the backing
for The Message vanished mid-production, it was Libyan leader Muammar al
Gaddafi who ended up financing the film, as well Moustapha Akkad’s next and
final film, Lion of the Desert.
Although Lion of the Desert was the
bigger failure, The Message was a
much bigger risk. It attempts to tell the story of the prophet Mohammed and the
birth of the Islamic faith while keeping in accordance with Muslim belief,
which does not allow a depiction of the man on film.

The character of
Mohammed is often portrayed as the camera, and we are his point-of-view as
other discuss issues around him, though a fight sequence is attempted without
showing more than a sword. Since not even his wives or sons could be shown
onscreen, the character of his uncle, Hamza (Anthony Quinn), became the main
character in the film. This actually works quite well, despite the awkwardness
of the scenes where actors were forced to pretend to listen to unspoken
dialogue, as not even the prophet’s voice was permitted to be imitated.

Lion of the
Desert is actually a rather good epic, taken in the vein of Lawrence of Arabia
(1962) and other epics from the 1960s. The biggest problem is that this film
doesn’t seem to have grown any in the two decades since epics such as this had
passed in popularity, and that may be why it resulted in one of the largest
financial disasters in cinematic history. Costing 35 million dollars to make,
it only made 1 million worldwide, banked by Libya’s own dictator, Colonel
Muammar Gadaffi.

Behind all of
the interesting film history is a movie which is often quite entertaining, if
not a bit long and over-ambitious. The film’s main focus of the film is the
guerilla warfare waged by Omar Mukhtar (Anthony Quinn) and his followers,
Bedouin patriots in Libya
fighting the Italian colonization in 1929 by Dictator Benito Mussolini. In an
effort to get rid of the pesky resistance fighters, General Rodolfo Graziana
(Oliver Reed) is appointed as sixth Governor to Libya. Despite an army of men and
brilliant minds attempting to stop him, Mukhtar is able to become a menace to
the Italian army by evading them in the deserts and mountains.

My
three-year-old nephew has recently become obsessed with Spider-man, so much
that he is now rarely seen without his own costume and mask. My sister-in-law
has been adamant about which version of the comic book super-hero her young son
is permitted to watch, with only a classic 80s cartoon being non-violent
enough for his malleable mind. We are careful about how we expose children to ideas, whether in
setting examples as role models or by giving them proper ones for heroes. Not
that my nephew is likely to have spider-like abilities in the future, but if he
did I am certain that he would choose to wrap bad guys in web rather than harm
them.

But how can I be
certain that our entertainment can even have that kind of effect on behavior
and character? The answer to that question lies in City Lights; a comedic romance in pantomime by Charles Chaplin,
made years after silent films had become a thing of the past. City Lights may not be Chaplin’s best
film, and it is far from his funniest, but I have it listed as my favorite
because of the last five minutes of the film. Even with nearly two decades
passing between viewings, I still had those final images burned into my brain.
I loved Chaplin as a child. He was my hero, and those final five minutes taught
me how to love. Within the deepest fibers of my soul is a tattered bowler hat
in search of a rose to be plucked from the gutter.

I can never have
enough buddy cop movies, and 2 Guns is
easily one of the best to come out of Hollywood
in a great long while. It was so perfectly aligned with the formula for the
sub-genre that I felt inspired to have a Lethal Weapon marathon after watching 2 Guns. There are few surprises in 2 Guns, but it serves its purpose with
expert marksmanship. The jokes land and the bullets fly with tenacity and
confidence that can only come from a truly skilled director and a cast so
talented that their performances always appear natural.

Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur proved
his abilities with suspenseful action with the surprising first-quarter
release, Contraband, which has an
action hero of sorts (played by Mark Wahlberg) who doesn’t use a gun to
accomplish his goals. 2 Guns puts a
gun in just about everybody’s hand, and blows up most of the vehicles in the
film. There is a great deal of action, predictable twists and turns and very
little original. Pair this with the dynamic performances by co-stars Wahlberg
and Denzel Washington, practical effects and minimal CGI and you have the formula for a summer blockbuster better
than all of the assortments of super-hero films.

I was left with
something of a bad taste in my mouth when I realized that the release of Parkland, Peter Landesman’s film about the events
following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, happens to coincide with the 50th
Anniversary of the tragic day. The Blu-ray release of this new film is
perfectly set up for release in November, the month our departed president took
that fateful trip to Texas,
as is a Blu-ray special edition release of Oliver Stone’s JFK. I can't commend their ability to cash in on an anniversary to sell more copies of films about a tragedy, though I suppose it doesn't make much difference after half a century.

Landesman takes
an approach which could not be much different from Stone’s, making no effort to
find any hidden truths about the events of the day, nor make any statements of any
significance. The tragedy is diminished to pure melodrama, albeit with
characters taken from real events. However accurate, one must wonder what
the point of this film is beyond forcing the moment of anguish upon those who
weren’t alive to experience it themselves.

Adventureland captures the essence of
twenty-something reality in showing the inevitability of compromise and
sacrifice of life after college. Hopes, dreams and ideals are endangered
species in the real world, and this is apparent in nothing more than a summer
job. James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) plans on taking a trip to Europe before starting graduate school, but when he
discovers that his father has been laid off, the graduate is forced to get a
summer job instead, simply with the hope that he will be able to afford further
schooling.

Unlike Waiting,
the restaurant comedy, Adventureland shows
a sweeter and more realistic view of a crappy job. Most of the time it is
boring, and what amusement there is to be found can usually be found in co-workers.
The theme park is run by enthusiastic couple, Bobby and Paulette (Bill Hader
and Kristen Wiig), maintained by the heartthrob married handyman, Connell (Ryan
Reynolds), though James learns how the amusement park really works through the
help of another co-worker (played by Martin Starr) who seems too intelligent to
be working fixed games at a glorified carnival.